Keeping track of what I do

Binary Downloads are Back at GitHub

Eight months after dropping support for binary downloads, GitHub re-enables them and calls them Releases. It’s a welcomed move which in my opinion is vital as offering binary releases is crucial for any project in a compiled language which targets end-users (as opposed to developers). Plainly put, when a user wants to download and use some software, he doesn’t want to mess with compilation issues and dependency. Unless of-course he is a Gentoo user, and then he’s probably more of a developer than a regular user).

The new GitHub releases have a nice feature which allows, actually requires you, to tag your release in the version control. That’s something I haven’t seen in other project hosting and it’s looks really positive. However, they still lack a basic feature SourceForge has had for years – download stats. It’s really nice to be able to know how many people downloaded each release of your project. Even plain download counter will do, you don’t need the full-blown download stats SourceForge has. I really look forward and hope that GitHub will implement this.